A Pouch of Pebbles
by LoquaciousQuark
Summary: Prompt fics from Tumblr, mostly featuring Hawke/Fenris. Sometimes it is the little moments between people that turn out to be the important ones.
1. Offer Me (Merrill, Hawke & Fenris)

tarysande asked: Mmm. Merrill and Fenris, Offer Me?

**—**

**Characters/Pairing:** Merrill, Hawke/Fenris  
**Rating:** G  
**Word Count:** 1,000 (drabble's a guideline, right?)  
**Prompt: **Offer Me: one character gives another a gift.  
**Summary: **Merrill sees more than people think.

—

This is what Merrill sees:

A focused gaze that lingers too long; the sudden, startling curve of a smile before it is swiftly killed; a hand marked front and back with white vines that clenches into a fist of both impotence and longing when no one is looking but Merrill. But she isn't much of anyone anymore either, she supposes, so perhaps it doesn't really matter.

Merrill sees, too, the stiff lines of awkward tension that splint together their broken conversations. They neither of them take hurt well, Merrill has found, especially when it's the soul that's cut, but Hawke's determined cheer is very daunting and Fenris has never been tolerant of sympathy, so instead she laces her fingers together in her lap and shores up their fragile peacework when she can, without them noticing, without speaking of scars.

—

This is what Merrill hears:

Anders's ungentle words, prodding with the sure fingers of a healer at a bruise too fresh for touch; the shift of armor and leather as two people put a distance between themselves; the quiet joy in Aveline's voice as she pledges herself to Donnic, and the hush of an unmet hope from the place where Hawke stands beside her.

Fenris wears silence like armor. But Merrill knows better than him the way a wounded thing crouches and flinches and makes itself small and quiet before the hunter; and the greater way a forest settles into deep stillness in the hour before opening itself to dawn. Fenris straightens his back and sets his jaw; Merrill hears the thump of blunted claws as a lean wolf whines for the warmth of a fire he desperately fears.

Merrill has lost her pack, too. Sometimes she walks with him where he follows, quietly, not because he wants her there but because she knows what he doesn't, that it is best sometimes to be beside someone and not behind them, that to be lonely does not mean you must always be alone.

—

This is what Merrill does:

Lets Isabela wonder about what went wrong; lets Varric wish he'd heard the story; lets Hawke's dog put his great slobbery head on her knee and look up at her, knowing, a secret between the two of them like a promise. They match well here, elf and hound, because if they do not always understand the jokes they both know truth when they see it, even if the truth is hard, and they know too that not all secrets must be beaten and bruised and dragged out into the light before they are ready.

And one night, when Hawke comes to visit and has a good deal too much elvhen sweet wine, Merrill lets herself be calm and open as a pool hidden between the roots of a great oak tree, listening, learning, absorbing truth and hurt alike as it spills out between Hawke's fingers. She waits for Hawke to finish even though she knows the way this tale goes already, because sometimes too the act of speaking is as much a lance as a salve, and then she kneels down and takes Hawke's hands in her own, and she tells a little tale of her own.

It's not much, not really, but it's one of her favorites and true besides, about a stoneworker who lives at the edges of camp and makes the faces of the Creators and the Forgotten Ones in ironbark and jet. One day he finds his work disarranged, the Dread Wolf brought full into the circle of the others; he moves him away when he is finished with the day's work, and the next morning he finds again Fen'Harel standing in the circle. That night he asks his little daughter what she has seen, and his daughter tells him that she herself had been the one to put the Dread Wolf with his brothers again.

He asks her why she has done this, and in the easy confidence of a child she tells him, "Because when you are alone so long, sometimes you forget how to make your way back home."

Hawke stares at her when she has finished, as if Merrill herself has become one of the creatures of her stories, but when she tries to pull away and stand Hawke hugs her instead. "Thank you," Hawke says into her ear, smelling of sweet wine, as if Merrill has given something of worth to her friend. Then Hawke stands and laughs a little, more freely, and strides out the door with a wave and just the barest hint of a wobble, and Merrill leans against the table and sighs.

Three years, she thinks, is a very long time.

—

So in the end, then, what Merrill gives is what she keeps: Hawke's secrets, and Fenris's secrets, and the truths that hide between them both like rock ivy rooting deep and strong before it bursts at last into the light. _That _is what she has always been meant for, after all, Keeper in training and in spirit, whether or not Marethari wishes it.

These things are hers to remember, and to understand.

And when at last one day she sees Fenris step a little closer than three years' habit has allowed, she is not surprised at all to see Hawke look over and smile, openly, without hurt. And when she hears Isabela laugh and Varric go digging for his pen, Merrill permits herself a little smile of her own because _she _knew how this would end, because there is no story to tell that does not have an ending.

—

One day, Fenris falls into step beside her. He cannot quite meet her eyes, because even wolves who are not so dreadful are proud, but he says, "Hawke told me," and, "I am grateful," and, at last, "Merrill."

And as he strides forward again to his place beside Hawke, Merrill links her hands together and lifts them above her face, looking up, smiling, into the sun.


	2. Haunt Me (Hawke & Fenris)

w0rdinista asked: F!Hawke, Fenris: Haunt me.

—

**Characters/Pairing:** F!Hawke/Fenris  
**Rating:** G  
**Word Count:** 1,500 (if I can't write a drabble, I'm going to at least do round numbers, darn it!)  
**Prompt: **Haunt Me: one character watches over another.  
**Summary: **Everywhere Fenris goes, he carries his past with him.

**Notes: **This kind of ended up in the same space as Offer Me, but I promise it's unintentional. Happier stuff is just around the corner, I'm almost entirely certain. :D

—

Oh, oh, little slave, little wolf, sweet swift-running heart-stealer, what are you doing? You look with those wanting eyes, those guarded and cold and hungry eyes, and you let yourself grow bold. _You _know what you are; you know where you belong. You know that despite your yearning reach, your hands have only ever closed around black-feathered death.

You are only a slave. What are you doing?

—

Fenris does not sleep often. He has many reasons to give Hawke when she asks, easy things to explain given his history and her own, her demons, his ghosts. It is simple to overpower an escaped slave who is asleep, he tells her; the lyrium in his skin gives him stamina and strength greater than many men; Danarius disliked laziness and took care to discourage it in his household.

All of these things are true, and Hawke accepts them, but none of them is the truth.

Fenris does not sleep often because when he sleeps, he dreams.

It is not the faces that disquiet him, though something thickens in his throat at the glimpses of a girl with red hair turning to glance over her shoulder, of an older woman beside her, tall, elf-eared, both smiling and sad as they look for him and are swallowed by darkness. Neither is it the memories as bright as life of Danarius, laughing, his fine-boned fingers drawing over his cheek, his shoulder, the dip at the small of his back where there is no lyrium. _That _shame-hot impotence he has known since the first days of his waking life; _that _deep-rooted terror he keeps in his given name.

No, what wakes him cold and sweating in the dark hours of the morning when the Fade is thick and not even the moon gives light—is the voice. It speaks quietly, and with hard, bitter truths, telling him what he knows already, reminding him when he is stripped of all defenses what is left of him beneath the armor, beneath the lyrium, beneath the careful walls he has built over seven years of flight.

It is no demon's voice. It is his own.

—

Where is your place, nameless thing? Look at you, crouching in your master's home, shielded by your master's armor, clutching to your empty heart the sword your master gave you. What do you know of freedom?

You have so many pretty words, stray-running wolf, if no tongue to speak them with. Your master taught you to flatter him; court her the same way, quick, before she takes in hand the lead that still dangles from your muted throat.

And she will, if she can. You know it.

—

He cannot sleep, so instead when night falls Fenris takes up his sword and steals out into the Hightown streets, a ghost in the dark. There is work there for a wolf, even one on a heavy chain, and death too, and between those things there are moments when he feels near enough to free that he almost forgets the weight of his shackles.

And when Hawke joins him on those nights, quiet and smiling and demanding nothing but his company, he forgets to guard against his dreams. Street by street they take the city, and lane by dim-lit lane, each road opening ahead of them like a promise, unspoken, unfolded to sudden swift-glancing hope. _She _hopes, he knows; he can read with the eyes of a slave every fleeting word in his master's face. But he has hopes too, and dreams, and when one night he stumbles blind into her home with death and hatred cupped in his hands she makes it a simple thing to let them go at last.

But sleep does not bring him the peace it brings her, and as the Veil flutters around him like a wind-caught shroud and the hole of his memory flickers with the bright broken-glass shards of a thing that was once whole, Fenris remembers that there is a ghost at his back and a hand around his throat. It tightens to squeezing when she wakes, when she looks at him with—hope, but white-knuckled fists do not make the voice less true when it whispers: _slave, unworthy dog, beg and kneel and run—run—_run!

—

There, wolf! Even when you wish to you cannot sheath your claws; even muzzled you snap at gentleness. There are shackles on your wrists heavier than any struck from steel, you spineless slave, and iron chains built by your own two hands that bind you fast as a whip's tail. You deserve no touch that is not a blow.

Close up your heart. There is nothing but weakness there, no softness but the putrid rot that sickens and poisons all who touch it. Shore up your walls, you heartless thing, you hate-choked death-giver. Protect her. Protect yourself.

You deserve _nothing _of freedom.

—

So Fenris runs, even if he does not leave, and as the years roll over the city he pretends that distance is enough, that denial is enough, that he does not lie in his stolen bed at night, sleepless, dreaming with his eyes open of those things a slave has no right to touch. He has eaten once at the master's table; let that be enough, a memory to wash smooth the rough edges of the rest, an ember to warm his fingers against the time when Hawke will reach for another more suited to stand beside her. He knows the place he has given himself, wolf bound to her heel—and he knows too the bitterer truth that if she holds his lead it is only because he placed it in her hand.

But Hawke does not turn elsewhere, and she does not call him to stay; instead she looks at the red-cloth shackle he has made for himself as if it is a hopeful thing, as if what it means to him—means something to her.

And when one morning he steps from his uneasy dreams into a waking nightmare more horrifying for being _real_, Hawke is the one to teach him that not all ghosts are beyond the blade, that just because an evil thing is strong does not mean it cannot be slain. He opens his mouth and the noose around his neck unknots; he says _you are no longer my master _and though there is another layer behind his words, another master left in place, it is his own breath he speaks with, his own voice, his own heart.

That is what he gives Hawke, later, when she comes to him in the house she thinks of as his, to the hearth she thinks of as his. It is only a slave's heart, a little thing that she owns already, soft with the deep black rot of constant fear, but despite its faults it is all that he can offer, and when she takes it in her hands like a precious thing he hears the distant clear ring of a shackle breaking open, of a length of chain slipping free to fall on shining stone.

She pries it open, looks in fearlessly. No rot, she says, touching his cheek, no poison. Only bruises.

—

_Little slave, little wolf. What are you doing?_

—

The voice is quiet that night, soft and hissing like fired tongs thrust into still water, but for the first time in the unsteady mire of his memory there is no strength to it, no conviction, no more solidity than any of the shades he has hunted and killed with the woman who sleeps beside him. No truth either, not in the way it whispered to him once, with hard words that chased him to peace and from it again as if he were the only one with a heart that ached, the only one with a shadow haunting his steps.

But there is no master so cruel he cannot be killed. Fenris knows this now.

Slave, ghost, shade of what has been—he banishes them all, these tattered shreds of a life he no longer lives. Those chains have been broken; _those _memories he has no need to keep so close in his fists, not now, not when there is hope and truth and new memories to be made that carry no fear in their making. His choice he keeps wrapped around his wrist; his heart is bound with it.

"Fenris," Hawke murmurs, smiling, and he knows his name for his own.

—

No turning back, heart-stealing wolf, not anymore. You've broken hers; now you must mend it, no matter the trembling in your slave's soul, in your slave's hands.

You've closed the path behind you. Look up. Look forward.

_Yes_, he thinks, and he closes his eyes, listening to Hawke breathe softly against his neck where there is no chain, no collar, no lead. Just because he is hers does not mean he is not also his own.

—

Fenris sleeps, fearing no dreams.


	3. Tell Me (Fenris, Donnic, Hawke & Fenris)

apocalisse asked: Let's see… Donnic and Fenris, "Tell Me"

—

**Characters/Pairing:** Fenris + Donnic, background f!Hawke/Fenris & Donnic/Aveline  
**Rating:** G  
**Word Count:** 1,200  
**Prompt:** Tell Me: one character confesses something to another.  
**Summary:** Two friends play cards.

—

"Two."

"Hmm. Perhaps you should reconsider."

"You, serah, are only saying that because you've won the last three hands. Two cards, if you please, and less insubordination in the ranks."

"Your wife has been quite an influence," Fenris said, nearly certain that was what he meant, and slid two cards from his well-worn deck across the table. They were backed with leering purple harlequins, and he wondered absently if Isabela had given him the pattern on purpose. There was a mostly-empty jug of undefinable alcohol at Donnic's elbow and a pair of wholly-empty glasses upturned beside it; they threw back the cards' reflections from their curves, turning two harlequins to eight, and when they abruptly vanished from the little stained-glass world Fenris blinked before realizing Donnic had plucked them from the table.

Donnic arranged the cards in his hand. Peered at them. Moved one of them two places to the left. Peered again.

"Your call," Fenris said.

"No, yours. I raised you, remember?"

Fenris lifted an eyebrow, looked at his cards, folded them into a neat stack between his fingers. "Call, then," he said at last, not even minding that he couldn't remember if Donnic was correct or not. His hand was a winning one in three of the games they were accustomed to wagering over, and Fenris was reasonably sure they were playing diamondback. "Knights over Serpents."

"Damn," Donnic said, and tossed the lot of his cards to the table.

Fenris smirked, arranging the fan of colorful cards a bit more neatly over the scarred, pockmarked wood, then leaned back and crossed his arms. "An even four," he said. "Soon I will know even the names of your childhood friends."

"Only because Aveline made me promise to stop taking your coin," Donnic grumbled.

"Your memory is different from mine."

"Like sweets from a child, she said. It's cruel to the poor fellow, she said."

Fenris snorted. "She said nothing of the kind. And you're stalling."

"Damn," Donnic said again, and scratched the thickening stubble on his jaw. "Oh! All right. I have a birthmark on my left foot shaped like a falcon."

"You do not."

"In flight," he stated, and at Fenris's skepticism was apparently struck with the inspiration—alcoholic or otherwise—to bend under the table and fumble with both hands at his ankle.

"Oh," Fenris said, when the meaning of the motion filtered at last through his pleasant drunkenness; a moment later he added, "no," as if it made a difference. Donnic ignored both words, articulate as they were, and as his boot at last came free he leaned back in his chair, rolled his pants sloppily to the knee, and dropped his bare heel upon the table with a thump that rattled the empty glasses.

"A falcon." He bent his toes, straightened them again. "In flight. Flying."

Fenris did not, he decided, have much right to complain on the grounds of cleanliness—certainly not here, in this infrequently-used room set off his main hall, where the fire was warm and bright enough to illuminate almost every piece of long-broken furniture—and after a moment he forgot his unvoiced protest in favor of the blurry bird on the back of Donnic's left foot. His toes had a fine dusting of dark hair across their backs, and Fenris found himself both fascinated and vaguely baffled by the sight of them.

"That," he said at last, "is a pigeon."

"It is not. It's a falcon."

"A dying pigeon."

"Aveline says it's a falcon."

"Aveline is a kind woman."

"Shut up, serah, and deal the hand."

"As soon as you remove your foot from my table, guardsman."

—

"I have only recently learned to read," Fenris admitted later, placing two more bottles of wine on the table.

"I saw the children's primer by the stairs," Donnic told him, shuffling his winning hand into the deck. "Besides, you never return any letters."

"Perhaps it's their author."

"Or the penmanship," Donnic said, and dealt.

—

"I'm in love with my wife."

"That is no secret."

"No," Donnic agreed, "but it's true."

—

"I am," Fenris started, then fell silent. One of his hands still splayed open on his cards; he could see the Lady's eye twinkling up at him above the join of his thumb and forefinger. "I am," he said again, and then, "you," and then, "Hawke—"

Donnic shook his head, tipping the bottle until red wine spilled out into Fenris's half-empty glass. "Keep that one," he said. "Other ears need to hear it first."

Fenris said nothing, and when his glass was full he lifted it to his lips and drained it dry.

—

He did not know the time. Somewhere near three, he thought, late enough to be early and early enough that not even the Chantry bells would ring the hour. Donnic had retired to the sofa with the sagging center cushion, his legs stretched out to the dying fire as he stared meditatively at his still-bare left foot. He shifted his toes in the flickering shadows and the falcon-pigeon flapped its wings; Fenris blinked the image away, blinked again at a world gone blurry, and sighed, returning his waning attention to the single-handed game of Wicked Grace he'd begun against himself.

Two Songs and the Knight of Mercy, and no help at all from the gloating purple harlequins dancing over the deck. He drew a card.

"Anyone home?"

Aveline's voice was loud and too cheerful for the hour, and Donnic rolled to a sitting position with a sudden look of alarm. "Here!" he called, scrubbing one hand over his face; Aveline strode through the open door, Hawke behind her, and Donnic lurched abruptly to his feet. "Captain! Aveline." He wavered a bit and Aveline gripped his shoulder; then he focused on her face, and he said, more tenderly, "Hello, my dear."

She leaned closer, smiling, shaking her head, and Fenris glanced away as Hawke bumped his chair with her hip. "Good evening?" she asked, nodding at the haphazard pile of empty bottles and abandoned, wine-thumbed cards.

"Good enough," Fenris said, and tossed his hand to the table as he stood. "And yours?"

"Good enough," parroted Hawke, reaching to touch the cards he'd thrown down. "The Angel of Death. Game's over, I suppose."

Donnic looked over then, more intently and lucidly than Fenris thought he had a right to, especially considering the arm he'd slung heavily over his wife's shoulders to remain upright. "And you know what that means," he stated, his voice serious—and then he smiled. "You must show your hand."

"What did he mean?" Hawke asked later, once Aveline had coaxed her unsteady husband out the door at last, his forgotten boot dangling from her free hand.

"That," Fenris said, suppressing a smirk, turning to gather the cards that had lost and won him the hand at once, "is a secret."


	4. Drink Me (Sebastian & Bianca)

foxghost asked: Sebastian vael/Bianca, drink me

—

**Characters/Pairing:** Sebastian + Bianca  
**Rating:** G  
**Word Count:** 1,500  
**Prompt: **Drink Me: one character toasts another.  
**Summary: **Sebastian's not quite sure how this happened, but now that he's here, he's going to see this through.

—

It's just him, a single squat candle melting into itself in the center of the table, and the crossbow.

Sebastian knows he's treading into dangerous territory being here like this, in silence, in secrecy. Varric is less than a stone's throw away, leading his bi-weekly writing workshop in the Hanged Man's noisy main room, and any moment might bring the dwarf back up the stairs for his pen-nibs or spare vellum or a thousand things that a storyteller would need to instruct others in the craft. But there's another layer of danger here too, not something he can put his hands on but a threat as deadly as any pair of blades to the back.

It's foolish. Sebastian _knows _it's foolish. But he's been in Kirkwall too long and he's read too much of Varric's writing, and despite its foolishness he knows that sometimes Hawke's jobs wrap up a little _too _neatly; that not all of Varric's tales are exaggerated for publication; that extraordinary things sometimes happen when a power he cannot understand demands it.

Which is, after all, why he's here in Varric's suite, a pair of Varric's tumblers in one hand and a round bottle of pale wine in the other, sinking into a low chair set opposite a crossbow as if it is a normal, expected thing to do.

"What do you _mean _you've never bought her a drink?" comes Isabela's voice in his head again, strident and scandalized as he's never heard her before, and Sebastian sighs as he sets the tumblers on the table with a hollow thunk.

They'd been out on the Coast on one of Hawke's herb-gathering expeditions, and without the immediate threat of raiders or slavers flinging arrows at them from on high they'd actually managed to carry on an entire, pleasantly uninterrupted conversation. At least, until Sebastian had mentioned that one of Bianca's bolts had nicked his ear in the last battle, and Isabela, Hawke, and Fenris alike had stopped midstep to stare at him.

And he thought Isabela had been _joking _about the drinks_. _But when he'd asked Hawke had nodded and even Fenris had coughed into his fist and turned away, and then Isabela had cocked her hip and grinned and told him that considering his history, he ought to have known to court a lady properly before expecting her favor in battle. If it had been the one instance he would have ignored the thought completely—but with Isabela's lifted eyebrow had come other memories, other incidents, his shoulder clipped with a bolt in flight, his hair rustled by something more than an errant breeze. Too many for coincidence.

So here he is, armor forgone in the favor of dark clothes better-suited for climbing tavern walls, plying another man's crossbow with alcohol in the middle of the night.

"Well," he says, popping the cork from the bottle of wine. "Bianca."

The crossbow, predictably, makes no response. Instead it lies there where it has been placed on the table, balanced on one outstretched arm, tipped towards him as if in expectation.

Sebastian pours a finger of wine into each tumbler, then—almost without hesitation—pushes one of them across the table. It catches on one of the planked sections where the wood is uneven and the wine sloshes up the inside of the glass. "My apologies," Sebastian murmurs out of habit, and shakes his head at himself as he places the glass just inside the curve of Bianca's reach. The lone, stubby candle's light catches along the ripples of wine, circling gold streaks until the almond-pale surface smoothes out again, settles.

She really is a magnificent weapon, Sebastian thinks, leaning back in his chair, all sleek lines and polished wood and just the right arrangement of grooves and strings. Even the mechanical bits of which he normally disapproves have their own sort of shine that makes them more than metal, more than gears and steel shafts: something else, something—elegant. Something beautiful.

"Bianca," he says again; then he adds, because it seems right, "Lady." In Starkhaven he would have bowed over her hand; here, he settles for a respectful inclination of his head. His head. For a _crossbow._

He is not nearly drunk enough for this.

He takes a sip—gulp, really, if he's honest with himself—of wine, then replaces the glass on the table. A raucous cry echoes up from downstairs and Sebastian glances to the door, tensing, but there is no subsequent patter of dwarven feet on the stairs, no cheerful tenor heralding his imminent demise.

"Maker preserve me," he says to himself, and his fingers tighten around the glass. "I _will_ have done with this. Lady," he adds, louder. "I hope you'll forgive my rudeness for not coming to you earlier. It was an oversight on my part to deny you the courtesy of a proper introduction."

As he expects, Bianca says nothing. But for a split-second light gleams on her untensed string and he thinks, startled, that it—she—_it _is pleased—and then, abruptly, the moment is gone again.

"That is," he continues awkwardly, unsettled, "we have fought together now for some years. And it has been—brought to my attention, as it were, that I have long owed you recognition for your efforts in battle. I consider my own longbow a worthy partner in my efforts, and though he lacks your—character, I would be displeased to find him—it—disparaged as a simple tool bent to the strength of my arm."

Sebastian takes another sip and leans forward, caught up in his own thoughts. "You truly are a marvel," he says to Bianca, and means it. "I think that even if the greatest archer in the world took hold of you, and the greatest dwarven smith in the world tuned your springs to his liking, no bolt would ever fly as true for him as they do for Varric."

There is _definitely _a glib star-flash along her string this time, but Sebastian knows even as he says it that it is true. "There is something to be said for trust in one's partner, whether or not that partner is… Hm. Vocal."

There is a pause, and Sebastian lifts his glass to his lips. Wood cannot creak amusedly, he tells himself. A gear cannot tighten with a sound like a snicker without a hand to twist it.

Candlelight winks along Bianca's string again, and this time it chases all the way down her polished oaken shaft to twinkle at the molded, well-used grip.

"Oh, no," Sebastian says hurriedly. "I couldn't dare. I mentioned the cocking ring _once _and learned my lesson swiftly enough—you will not ensnare me in such a trap again."

He blinks. Are her arms—_flexing?_

Sebastian stands, planting both hands on either side of his glass, and is pleased to find the table both solid and thoroughly, reassuringly impassive. "Good night, Lady," he says, looking everywhere but at the temptress lying so innocently across from him. "Bianca. It was a pleasure. Truly, we must meet again soon—or rather, Varric ought to bring you by. The Chantry, I mean. If you like."

Then—footsteps. _Varric's _footsteps, too, because of _course _Varric is coming, because of course Sebastian wants nothing more than to get away unseen after a dalliance with another man's crossbow. But he is not without his own skills, and before the key finishes turning in the lock Sebastian is out the window, sure-footed and silent despite his haste, sequestered in the shadows gathered in the alley below.

"_Well_," comes Varric's voice above him, and Sebastian flattens himself further against the wall. "That went surprisingly well, considering how few of them had ever heard of iambic pentam—"

There is a sudden, awful silence, and Sebastian remembers with painful clarity the two tumblers laid out on the table, the rounded bottle of sacramental wine pilfered from the Chantry's stores at the last minute.

"Bianca," Varric says then, his voice at once wry and terrifyingly precise, as if its owner meant to pitch it towards any listening ears below his window. "You've been courting again. I thought we handled this after the last few times Rivaini came calling while I was out."

Silence—and the pointed creak of a tightening string. Sebastian doesn't think it's Bianca's will at work this time. "Damnation," he breathes, leaning his head back against the brick; he sidles sideways, pulling the whole of his training to the soles of his feet, his hands, the insistent weight of stealth. Varric's head appears at the window—but by then Sebastian is free, safe in the dubious sanctuary of Lowtown's streets proper, and despite the gravity of the situation he cannot help his smile.

A lady courted—and a lady's favor given. "Your servant," he murmurs, bowing from the waist in her direction; then he throws his cloak back over his shoulders and, thinking of laughter caught along a bowstring, Sebastian sets off into the night.


	5. Yahoo Me (Hawke & Fenris)

girl-chama asked you: "Yahoo me!" :D

—

**Characters/Pairing:** Fenris/F!Hawke  
**Rating:** G  
**Word Count:** 1,300  
**Prompt: **Yahoo Me: the characters celebrate something.  
**Summary: **Sometimes, two people having a quiet conversation in the dark is a greater victory than any battlefield.

**Recommended Listening: **Los Angeles (watch?v=smH3-JqEwoA) by Peter Bradley Adams.

—

"Do you know what today is?"

Fenris looks at her without lifting his head. Every bit of him is lazy, loose, his hair falling pale and tousled over his eyes, the fabric of her bedspread draping heavy from his bent knee over his waist, his thigh. For once he is all curves and nothing hard: the swoops and curls of lyrium over his bared chest, rounding and easing again as he breathes; the dim firelight pooling gold in the hollow of his throat, in the bend of his elbow where he has tucked one hand beneath his head—

His eyes, open and unguarded in contentment. The half-curve of his smile.

Hawke rolls to her stomach, pillowing her head on her arms. Fenris's gaze slides down the curve of her back to where the covers spill over her naked hip; then his eyes come back to hers, and Hawke smiles herself at his expression. "Today," she says again. "Do you realize what it is?"

"No. Should I?"

"Maybe not. It's sheer chance I remember myself."

Fenris lets out a deep sigh, the sound meant to mock but emerging utterly relaxed instead, and closes his eyes. "And do you intend to dangle this secret before me all night?"

Hawke hums and resettles herself on her arms, flicking her hair away from her face. "That depends on how stubborn you are about guessing it, I suppose."

"I despise guessing games."

"And I happen to love them. Whatever's a girl to do?"

"Find less-tiresome entertainment," Fenris suggests, the corner of his mouth quirking.

"Impossible. Your continued refusal to spar against my sparkling wit is all that keeps me going some days."

"If 'wit' is meant to be 'unreasonable persistence.'"

"Six of one, half a dozen of the other. Three years ago today," says Hawke, dramatic as if she is announcing Orlesian nobility, "you came creeping into my foyer to tell me you were very upset about Hadriana's death."

His eyes come open again at that, his smile shrinking, but Hawke knows Fenris well enough to see he is neither upset nor disturbed by the memory—only startled, and counting backwards in his head. "Already three?" he asks himself, his eyes distant with time. "What is the date?"

"Fifteenth Kingsway."

"I don't—remember."

"I wouldn't have either if it hadn't been precisely a month before my nameday. Aveline mentioned it today and I realized she was right."

He turns on his side to face her then, propping his head on his hand. "There are some things about that time I would change."

"And some I wouldn't," she points out. Fenris looks at her but says nothing, conceding her the issue, and Hawke hides her smile in the crook of her elbow. "Besides," she adds, lifting an eyebrow, "I've been thinking up some _wonderful _ways for you to make up all those missed anniversaries."

"Ah," Fenris says. "Extortion."

Hawke laughs, reaching up to tug at a bit of the white hair over his eyes. Fenris grimaces but allows it, and after a moment Hawke relents, sliding her fingers fully into his hair and over his scalp, tracing an aimless path along his temple, behind his pointed ear, down the dip at the nape of his neck. "Oh, yes," she tells him softly, watching his eyelids flutter and close and open again, his expression somewhere between pleasure and deep suspicion. "Extortion as you've never _dreamed_."

His voice is lower than usual, rumbling with her ministrations. "Explain."

"Three poems."

"What?"

"Three poems," Hawke says again, careful to keep her hand moving through his hair, careful to keep her tone perfectly reasonable. "Penned by your own hand, delivered one each morning with a single red rose by my breakfast-table. You may give them to Orana for delivery."

His eyes come open at that, narrowed slits of green focusing on her face like arrows pinning quarry before a kill, but he says nothing, waiting, patient and inscrutable. Hawke bites down hard on the inside of her cheek before continuing. "Then, at noon on the third day, I will put on my mother's best courting gown from the attic and meet you in the square. It's a bit old-fashioned and I think you could fit four people under the skirt, but the velvet ribbons have hardly mildewed at all."

Fenris's eyebrows shoot up like a line has yanked them—but a moment later Hawke sees the start of a curling smile. "And then?" he asks.

Oh, _damn_, she thinks, and laughs. She's oversold it. But—oh well. She rather likes this next bit. "A healthy constitutional. We will tour the estates like a perfectly respectable couple and have perfectly respectable conversations about the weather and hors d'oeuvres and pointed shoes, and then you will return me safely to my front door with nothing more than a perfunctory hand to my elbow."

"Chaperoned?"

"Naturally."

"And a polite farewell."

"As reserved as possible."

He leans closer, then, close enough that Hawke's hand slides free of his hair, her fingertips trailing down the back of his neck and along his spine, pausing, pressing gently into the warm shift of muscle and skin between the blades of his shoulders. "And then?"

"And then," she tells him, her voice dropping with deep secrecy, "in the dark of night when everyone's asleep and there's only the moon to guide you, you'll climb the rose-covered trellis against the wall, slip in through my conveniently-unlocked window—to a breathless string sonata, if you can get the musicians—and make mad, passionate love to me until first light."

Fenris stares—and he drops his forehead against her own and laughs, soft but unreserved, his shoulder shaking where it presses against her own, his thumb ghosting over her throat as he lifts his hand to her cheek. "Hawke," he says, "you have no trellis."

"No trellis," she agrees as he lowers his head to her pillow beside her, so close her nose brushes against his as she turns to him. "And no roses."

"And no musicians."

"And no window wide enough for you to fit through."

"Not easily," Fenris says, and Hawke closes her eyes. He has settled near enough that she can feel the brush of his lips over the arch of her cheek, the rise and fall of his chest, the low steady thumps of his heart; she thinks a moment of another year, another night, a fat round moon like this one and a different ending altogether—and a beginning for them both. Less easy, perhaps, and with less warmth in its making, but no less precious to her for the pain of it.

Hawke opens her eyes. Fenris is watching her, quietly, his eyes half-lidded and golding with the flicker of firelight, and when she places the flat of her palm against his chest where the lyrium curves together to become one piece, he shifts closer to meet her, to keep her hand at his heart.

Oh, but she loves him.

"I suppose," she whispers thickly, smiling, "we'll have to make do with what we have."

His mouth is against her mouth, not quite a press, not quite a kiss. "And what is that?"

"The moon," she says, and his fingers smooth over the skin at the small of her back. "You. Me. A promise of first light."

"Hawke," he says, and she shivers at the warmth there, at the gentleness, at the lazy curling affection that twines around her name, "this is enough."

She smiles to keep her heart from her throat. "Next year I want roses."

Fenris laughs, and nods, and presses his hand against her back with the promise; then he kisses her, and though there are no roses, no poems, no musicians' strings to mark the sweetness of the moment—it is perfect.


	6. Drink Me Redux (Hawke & Fenris)

rubyvroom asked you: fenris/f!hawke, drink me

—

**Characters/Pairing:** Fenris/F!Hawke  
**Rating:** T  
**Word Count:** 6000 (oh my goodness, this one got away from me!)  
**Prompt:** Drink Me: two characters drink, separately or together.  
**Summary:** They have two long unwinding roads behind them, and the important places are marked with empty glasses.

**Recommended Listening: **Frysta (watch?v=MvVEY2Emy1U) by Olafur Arnalds.

—

She is ten and her brother is five and her sister is five, too, and the wind is sharp enough that it slices between the walls and the door despite the blankets her mother has wedged in the cracks, cold enough to frost the quilts they four have wrapped around each other even before the roaring hearth-fire, loud enough that the howling rattles the windows and shakes the door and thumps at the roof like a wild demon seeking entrance to their souls. The snow is high as the sills and growing higher, swallowing them up in the way a quiet tide rises black in the night to leave no trace of them behind, and though she is the eldest and the tallest and her father has told her to be brave, her heart trembles to think of him out alone, lost, wandering, seeking a house that has been eaten by snow and swallowed in the dark.

"Are you afraid?" her mother asks, her voice gentle, her heavy shawl pulled close around her shoulders, touching first Carver's head, then Bethany's, disturbing neither of them from their uneasy sleep on her lap.

"No," she says, and lifts her chin. "Father promised to come home."

Her mother smiles, then, and warms the room with it; moth-like she draws closer, drawn by love's open light. Her mother stretches out her hand and strokes her hair and she feels the knot in her heart break a little, undone, giving way to simple surety. "He will come," her mother murmurs, and because her mother says it, it is true.

And it is true, she finds, when less than an hour later the front door blows open and the storm thrusts her father through, blustering and blowing snow into the corners like an angry maid with a broom, winds sneaking in through the blankets with chilled fingers as her mother rises.

"He'll live," her father says through four layers of scarf, ice cracking in his voice. His fingers are gloved thick as sausages and clumsy on his coat as he tries to unbutton it, and when her mother pulls his hat from his head a fresh torrent of snow sifts down over his shoulders. "He broke the leg clean through, but the mending was easy enough. He won't even have much of a scar." Her father pauses, his unwound scarf draping over one ungloved hand. "Unless he wants one, I suppose. Flames! I should have asked."

"Malcolm!"

Her father winks at her where she still sits by the fire, watching, and then turns to his wife. "Never fear, love. The boy will live unscarred and we will live undiscovered. Here," he adds, smiling, and pulls from his overcoat a large bottle of amber liquid that catches the firelight like gold. "Healer's fee."

"He owes you more than that for calling you out in this weather," her mother says, pursing her lips, but instead of putting the bottle away with the others in the locked cabinet above the stove she looks thoughtfully at her husband, and then at her daughter, and then she fetches two little clear glasses from the china cabinet and brings them over to the fire.

Her father joins them, most of his coats shed, his snow-crusted boots puddling on the rush mat by the front door, and without a word he lifts her into his lap, quilts and all. Bethany and Carver have curled together before the fire, their tousled dark heads nestled against each other; Carver snores, just a little, and moves closer to his sister, and though her father's chest is cold even through the blankets, and though she is the eldest and the bravest, she tucks her head under her father's chin and listens to his heart beating.

Her mother pours out the liquor in a smooth, gleaming fall, and hands one of the glasses to her father. "For the cold," her mother suggests, one eyebrow lifted, and raises the glass to her lips.

"Naturally," her father says, and there is something burning in the word, something burning in her mother's eyes—but the moment is a candle's breath, there and gone again, and after a long swallow her father hands her his own glass. "Here. Try it."

"Malcolm—"

"Just a sip! Just a sip," he adds to her, grinning in conspiracy, "or I'll be out in the storm again."

She looks to her mother, uncertain—but though her mother shakes her head she is smiling, just a little, and very, very carefully, she lifts the glass to her mouth and takes a sparrow's swallow of whiskey. It burns and she coughs, her eyes watering, her throat closing—but as she swallows she warms too, a little fire-bright coal dropping right into her heart to burn there.

This is how she falls asleep: her head on her father's heartbeat, her mother's voice and his entwining over her head, low and gentle, and heat unfurling in her chest, spreading out behind her ribs like wings.

—

He is eight and his sister is six, and he does not like the dry heat of Minrathous. Seheron is already fading in his memory, the traders' laughing voices giving way to slavers' shouts in the city marketplace, the soft undyed tents yielding to blazing scarlet banners that glare down at him with golden eyes, but even now he cannot forget the way the hot, wet warmth of the jungles wrapped around his skin, nor the way the sunlight filtered down in a heavy haze between the broadest leaves when he walked beneath them, one hand upstretched to their light-limned edges.

His mother wishes him to forget these things, he knows. Their master does not approve of daydreams.

But for all their master's power he cannot yet open a heart with his hand nor read a mind with his eyes, and so despite the risk of it he lets himself dream and he lets himself remember. He ducks around a woman with her arms full of dirty linens and thinks of the thick-boled trees dripping with vines; he passes under an awning's shadow and sees the tent-roof of their unburnt home; he lifts the curtain to his family's room and it is the little waterfall that tumbled down the rocks at the mouth of the creek, cool and dim and whispering secrets he could almost understand.

"There you are," says his mother without turning from where she kneels, her voice flat, her shoulders curved, and Seheron is gone. Her hands work a lump of pale dough on a stained cheesecloth, kneading, twisting, unceasing in their movement. "Help your sister with the candles."

The room is dim with shadows thrown by the rags strung over the window, thin shafts of dry sunlight choked with dust piercing the places where the weft has worn thin, mottling pale the far wall, his sister's shoulder where she sits at a worn basket, the red-gold of her hair where it falls from its tail. She looks up and smiles to see him, sweet enough for the bruise on her cheek, and when he crosses to her she passes him the packet of brass pins. The bedroll they share is thin but not as thin as nothing, and he sighs as he dumps a handful of slender white candles to the blanket between them.

They are quiet a long time. The work is mindless enough that he can dream and he does so, for a while, pretending the pins he pushes into the soft wax to mark the candle's hours are like the game he used to play with pebbles placed on a straight and balanced branch, dropped just so into position without weighing down one side or the other too heavily. Varania had been too little to play with him then; he does not know where he could get a branch in the city but there are pebbles enough, and if he is very good for the next week perhaps he will have a chance to ask the overseer for—

"_Leto_!" snaps his father, and the brass pin drives hard through the candle and into the soft flesh of his thumb. He knows better than to cry out—but the pin is thick and sharp and it _hurts_, and despite his best efforts tears sting fiercely behind his eyes. His mother's hands thud into her lump of dough without pause, without breaking, steady and dead.

"Stop that," his father says to his trembling lip, and then, "stand up. Come here."

He stands, his thumb clenched into his fist, and goes. Varania's eyes are huge above the bruise. "Did I do something wrong?"

"No. I am sold." His father's voice is bitter as the colus leaves that lined the jungle paths, and for once there is no sanctuary in the memory of his home. His mother's hands still do not stop their kneading. "I'm to go with Erisus in an hour. To Marnus Pell."

"Father—"

"Be quiet. Listen to me."

"But—"

His father grips his shoulder with tight, pinching fingers, the hold cruel enough to make him cry out. "Your mother," he says, his eyes fierce and wild and blazing as the sun through the jungle's trees, "your sister. You will protect them, Leto. Do you understand me?"

"Y—yes."

"Swear it."

"Father—"

"Swear it!"

"I swear it!"

His father thrusts him from him, then, and fumbles into the pouch at his waist. Ceramic clinks against steel and for an instant he thinks wildly of a knife—but instead his father pulls out a small flat dish and a tiny jug of sweet wine, and with trembling hands he pours the wine into the dish until it spills over the rim. "Hold this," he says. "Give me your hand."

He does, trembling himself; his father grasps the thumb that had been pierced and squeezes harshly, the skin turning white under the pressure until a fat drop of blood falls heavy from the end of his nail. Then his father snatches up a dropped pin from the ground and pierces his own forefinger, and with a motion almost frantic does the same to his own thumb until his blood has mixed with his son's in the pale wine.

"Drink it."

He does not want to—he does not like the sight of blood—but his father curves his weathered, work-callused hands around his son's, pressing, pushing, until the cool ceramic touches his lips. "Drink it," his father commands him. "You've made the oath of a man; seal it as one."

So he does, his eyes wide, three swallows until the dish is empty. He is not a man—he _cannot _be, not yet. He has too many dreams. His master will not approve.

"There," says his father, and when the dish is empty he smashes it on the ground in one quick movement and yanks his ancient, rusted dagger from beneath the other bedroll. "Remember this," he says without looking at his children, and Varania begins to cry.

He cannot move. He is frozen from the inside out, his veins iced over, the jungle heat of Seheron a lifetime gone and less than a ghost of a memory. His father pauses once at the doorway, his edges caught in cold light, his face turned back to the shadow where his mother kneels; then he draws in a quick breath and is gone.

Two days later, they hear word of a slave killed in assault of its master on the road to Marcus Pell. Varania does not understand. Leto does, and as he watches his mother's face settle into frozen stone, he thinks of wine, but he tastes only the hot bitter bite of blood.

—

She is fifteen and her idiot brother ruins everything.

The girl hadn't even been _nice_, idiot Elara with her idiot beautiful face who kept dipping Bethany's braid in ink, but Carver's big mouth is apparently a perfect match to Elara's and her templar father's, because thanks to all three of them here they are again, wandering Hawkes, mules hitched in the dead of night to a wagon loaded with all their earthly possessions as they fly from yet another town.

She'd _liked _West River, with its view of the Wilds and the cosy Chantry and the winding creek with the bridge that had lined the edge of the fields. Stupid Carver. Stupid _her, _for not thinking quick enough to stop him when he'd opened his mouth. Bethany had been soexcited about Summerday, too, promised by Mother Gera she'd get to light one of the candles at the service, and now instead they're starting over _again—_

She lets out a short, sharp sigh of frustration and shoves her hair behind her ears with one hand, tightening her grip on the mules' reins with the other. Her mother is in the wagon behind her with Bethany, asleep; her father and Carver walk just past the edge of the rutted dirt road, little more than shadows glinting here and there with crisp moonlight, her father's hand on her brother's shoulder, her brother's hands clenched at his sides. They walk there a long time, quietly, her father's voice little more than a bee's hum in the darkness. Carver says nothing at all.

They reach an inn just past midnight. It is not large, and not overly clean—but it is warm and dry and the mistress kind enough to put what is left of their dinner's stew over the fire, and by the time they have cleared their cracked wooden bowls her anger is not so hard to swallow, either. Carver looks only at his spoon, even when Bethany throws him tearful looks.

"Malcolm," her mother says, then, "why don't you put the twins to bed?"

Her parents share a look, and then her father goes, Bethany's hand tight in his and Carver close behind, and her mother takes her sister's empty seat and pushes her untouched cup of mead across the table. "Don't tell your father," she adds dryly at her daughter's look.

She takes a sip, looks down into the mug, cups both hands around its cool surface and watches the sweet honey-gold liquid settle again, smooth and flawless as if it had never been upended, never had its world spun around it without even a word of warning. "I'm _so _angry at Carver," she says, suddenly, and is startled by the sound of it.

"I know, darling," says her mother. "But he's your brother. You can't fight with him forever."

"I can fight with him tonight," she mutters obstinately, and takes another, longer swallow. "He ruined everything."

"He's ten."

"I had my magic by ten. _I _never told anyone and made the whole family pack up and leave."

"No?" her mother asks, gently, and she flushes from throat to cheek. She knows what her mother means—a girl she'd thought a friend, and a pond not quite warm enough to swim in, and a long, embarrassed, tearful journey north—and she drops her eyes to the cup again.

"I won't be upset with him tomorrow," she says. "I promise."

Her mother touches her hand. "You can be upset, darling. But you must also be kind. Your brother is angry too."

"Because we're all mages and he isn't."

"Because he put your sister—and your father—and _you—_in danger. He doesn't want you hurt because of his careless words."

She thumbs a chip in the cup's handle, inexplicable tears pricking behind her eyes, and her mother's hands slide from her wrist to her chin to tip it up, until their faces are level. "So," she says, swallowing once, and then again, "I should not be careless with my words, either."

"My girl," her mother murmurs, and then she smiles so warmly something aches behind her heart. "What a wonderful woman you're turning out to be."

She does cry at that, just a little, and that night, when Carver crawls into her bed whispering _sorry, sorry, sorry_, she pulls him close the way a big sister should and tells him _don't worry, everything is fine, I love you_.

—

He is seventeen and he is dead drunk.

The room is very dark—or are his eyes closed? He cannot remember; he opens them as wide as they can go and snorts a laugh when he stumbles over a sleeping body in the darkness. His mother makes a soft, crooning moan like a wounded bird and rolls away from his dirty feet, and he takes two—three—four uncertain steps before hitting the wall hard with both palms.

He laughs again and sinks down against it, leaning his head back against the cool dusty stone and staring blindly at the narrow strips of starlight at the edges of their door's curtained opening. "Done," he whispers to himself, and covers his face with his hand.

"Are you—are you _drunk?_" Varania's voice hisses out of the shadows like a coiled viper and he flinches away, startled, unsettled by the venom. "You _are_," she says, sitting up from her pile of thin blankets in the corner, and her hair tumbles down around her shoulders. "All that silver—Leto, how could you?"

"Leave it," he tells her, or he hopes he tells her, and drops to his side on his pallet, turning away from her without bothering to undress. There is a crack in the clay wall a handspan high, and as he watches it it seems to lengthen first one way and then the other, stretching across the whole of his vision until he blinks it back to dimmer starlight.

"What have you done?"

He does not answer. A moment later he hears the spindle-crack of her magic snapping flame to a candle, and meager yellow light spills over his shoulder and the side of his nose. He closes his eyes.

"Leto," Varania says, and when he still does not answer she kicks him hard in the ankle.

He bites back a snarl and props himself to one elbow, candlelight smearing across his eyes, and glares. "Leave me alone."

"Not until you tell me what you've done."

"Lower your voice!"

She kicks him again, hard enough to hurt. "Tell me!"

He is angry—he is drunk— "I entered the tournament!"

"You—" she says, her voice a ghost—then she pushes to her knees and fists a hand in his worn shirt to drag him closer. "You are a _bastard_."

He looks at his sister, his foolish, skinny, fifteen-year-old _brat _of a mageling, her eyes hard as diamonds and glittering, her mouth pulled hard and tight to keep her lips steady. "You know what our master does to slaves with magic."

"I do _not_ need your protection."

"The victor wins a boon of the magister."

"Victor!" she scoffs, disdain dripping from her teeth, fury in her tongue. "You will die in the third round."

"I will win."

"You will _die_," Varania says, and after she releases his shirt she slaps him open-handed across the face. He stares at her, astonished, lifts one hand to touch the sharp sting under his eye; her tears are gone, now, her cheeks white with anger and despair. "You will die and you will leave us alone."

"I will win," he says again, but the words are empty of hope, an offering to a deafened god. Varania flings herself back to her blankets, her spine stiff as a rail, and does not move again.

He watches her a long time. The cheap candle burns down, then gutters; he licks his fingers and pinches it to smoke, and then he stands and pushes the curtain aside to lean against the open doorway, crossing his arms over his chest, listening to the sounds of twoscore slaves settling around them for the night, just as they have the night before this and the night before that.

There is a step behind him near the second hour. Varania comes forward without a word, without looking at him, and sits silently by his feet in the doorway. Her shoulders are still stiff against the clay wall, her hands still knotted with anger, but soon enough her head comes to rest against his knee, and though the movement is not gentle it is sure.

Like this, they wait for dawn.

—

She is eighteen and she is in love.

He is tall and tow-headed and the son of the blacksmith, and as gentle as a pup with Bethany and Carver when they visit. More than once her sideways glances have caught him glancing back, and when one night he comes awkwardly to the window beneath the room she shares with Bethany, bringing with him a fistful of wildflowers and a genuine grin, she laughs and takes her father's bottle of whiskey, too.

They spend the night in the barn's loft, watching the stars through the skylight, watching each other drink from the same place on the rim, testing with fingertips and mouths and half-gasped words the things they had not known before. They spend the summer like this and the fall, too, in lofts and by the banks of Lothering's little river, under the oak his mother planted when he was born, in her father's fields, sunlit and warm. The whiskey comes along with them more often than not, but if her father notices, he never mentions it.

(She knows he notices.)

It is, though she is not fond of the word, idyllic. Her mother even hints at marriage, once or twice, though her blacksmith's son says nothing of it and she is not ready for the word herself, can hardly even imagine it: _wife_. She tells her mother this and laughs at the thought; her mother sighs and smiles and shakes her head, and her father leans his elbows on his knees and tells her, grinning, to save them all the trouble of planning and run off to Denerim instead.

But dreams, she knows better than many, are never things to be trusted, not when they are perfect, and when one day an accident crushes his hand in the forge they come to a gentle end. There is no one else near them and the injury is beyond simple splinting; so she heals him, carefully, quietly, her hands cupping magic like water, his fingers realigning themselves, the pain in his eyes giving way to the deeper wound of betrayal.

"I'm sorry," she tells him afterwards, when he clutches his hand to his chest and listens to the lies that slip so easily between them, even after this, even after everything. "My parents don't know. You're the only one."

"You never told me."

"I was afraid."

"I loved you," he says helplessly, and she says, just as grieved, "So did I."

"I won't tell anyone," he says, later, once the forge is cleaned and his hand is straight and they have both put away their hearts. She fumbles for a moment at the counter behind him; then she thrusts the nearly-empty bottle of whiskey into his hands.

"Keep this," she tells him. "My mother doesn't like liquor in the house anyway."

He thumbs the glass corner and musters up a half-smile that knocks her breath from her chest. He says, quietly, "It was good while it lasted."

"It was," she agrees, and makes it halfway home before she starts to cry.

—

He doesn't know how old he is.

He wonders about it, once, when he hears another magister discussing the ages of two of his stud slaves, but his master says it does not matter and so he does not think of it again. It is not his place to wonder, after all. He knows better now than to spend his thoughts on anything besides his master's will.

"Fenris," his master says, and he steps forward smoothly, one hand cupping the base of the silver decanter, the other wrapped just so along the elegant curve of the handle so that the lyrium is on full display. The markings are still tender, even after two years; he is grateful that the wine is not chilled tonight.

The Aggregio spills out in a smooth crimson stream, swelling inside the crystal of the woman's glass like an opened wound. Her fingers are long and elegant and adorned with many rings where they hold the stem, and when he bows to her and withdraws he can feel the weight of her curving smile settle heavy over his shoulders. The next course comes and she leans closer to his master, whispering, flirting, flicking her eyes at the watching slave in clear suggestion. Danarius leans back in his chair and lifts an eyebrow—and smiles.

His heart begins to race. He knows how this will end—wine licked from the end of his master's fingers, or the woman's mouth, or the stone between his master's feet—and he knows too that this is as much a test as any other task his master has set before him. He has not failed his master yet; he will not fail him here, either.

Danarius nods, approving, and even as a hot rush of pride swells in his throat his mouth goes dry, half-sick with anticipation and anxiety; the lyrium flickers up his arms in lines of white fire and his master smiles to see it, lazy, amused, gaze hot and open with lust. The woman twists in her chair to see what he stares at; when she realizes she lets out a light, beautiful laugh and lifts her wineglass to her lips. Fenris watches her helplessly, locked in place like a hare pinned by a hawk, her many rings burning bronze in the torchlight as she pinches the stem of her glass. Her throat opens and closes and opens again as she swallows, her eyes heavy-lidded and languid, and when the glass is empty she draws her tongue around its rim in a smooth circle.

"Don't _tease _my wolf, Hadriana," Danarius murmurs, though the words are pitched for Fenris, and the woman smiles, white teeth between lips stained scarlet.

—

She is twenty and her father is dead.

The world is cold for spring—or she is cold, she can't tell. The pyre burns hot enough to make her sweat and bright enough to sting her eyes with light and smoke, but she cannot feel the tips of her fingers and her teeth chatter like a child's in winter. Her mother is tall as a statue in her veil and she doesn't know how she has the _strength_—but Bethany is strong too, and Carver, and she-the-eldest-and-the-bravest is the one with trembling knees among them.

Eventually, Carver—fifteen and a head taller than her now—takes her elbow and guides her home. She sits at the kitchen table where he places her, staring at the golden grain of the wood her father had sanded and stained and polished, unmoving until the funeral ends and the entire town comes to their house to help them grieve.

Malcolm Hawke fished my son out of the river once. He helped me bring in half the harvest when my plow broke three summers back. He patched my roof the day after that terrible storm. Such a _nice _man, that Hawke was. So kind. Do you remember? Do you remember?

"Oh, flames," she breathes, and pushes up from the table. Someone has brought a crock of homemade liquor with a black ribbon tied around its throat; she plucks it from the table without ceremony, slipping out the back door, breaking into a dead run until she is so deep in the grain fields her father sowed that she cannot hear their consolations.

Then she lies flat on her back, crushing half the stems beneath her, and yanks the cork from the bottle. The smell alone is enough to burn her nose, but she screws her eyes shut and takes three long swallows, scalding the back of her throat and making her cough like she hasn't in years. The sky is very blue; she watches it deepen with noon, shading her face with her arm, drinking, listening to the empty place in her heart where her father used to be.

It's old Barlin that finds her there eventually, tramping back through the same fields on the way to his own farm. He looks at her upside down, his broad-brimmed hat shading his face and hers.

"What are you doing?"

"Grieving," she says—slurs—and wipes her mouth with the heel of her hand.

"Well, hurry up," he tells her, and looks back to the east fields. "_Someone_ has to be Hawke for your family now."

—

He is four weeks without his master, and he is weakening. The Fog Warriors are very kind—too kind, for a slave missing his master—and despite his every effort they will not leave him be. He eats because he must be strong and hale, but he cannot pretend there is not something familiar in the food that makes his heart race; he trains because he must be honed as his blade, but he cannot say the way the heavy wet heat of the island curls around him does not loosen something long clenched in his chest.

One of the women goes hunting and invites him; he goes without knowing why, his feet silent on the jungle floor, steady in his path as if he knows it. Sunlight filters down in great swaths around broad green leaves, dappling the woman into shadow before him, and when she disappears to stalk her prey he stays where he is instead, breathing the secrets of the shadows that he can almost understand. There are thick-boled trees all around him, wide at the trunk and smooth with years, untouched by Tevinter magisters or qunari blades, known only to these warriors he has found himself with. His eyes fall closed despite himself, the sound of insects and far-distant voices and an unseen stream all blending together, sharpening, striking something deep inside him that he cannot name.

He draws in a breath, looks up, into the sun, and stretches up one hand to touch a leaf edged in light. It is only an instant, but he thinks this might be—

_Careful, slave, careful. Be wary. There is no home for you but me._

He wonders, suddenly—is this true?

Later that evening he joins the warriors for the evening meal, and for the first time in his living memory he does not once wait for his master's leave to sit. All around him are people laughing, talking, trading stories and food alike as if there is no difficulty to it, and though Fenris cannot quite mimic their ease he thinks he understands the reason of it. The woman he'd hunted with smiles at him from her husband's other side, twining her fingers through his between their knees, and gestures at the dishes of strong, clear liquor laid out in the center.

"Choose one for yourself," she says around a mouthful of sweet berries. Her husband shakes his head in mock chagrin and she kisses his cheek, unabashed, unashamed.

"Thank you," Fenris says, and—he does.

—

She is twenty-three, and this is the worst year of her life.

Bethany is dead. Carver will barely speak to her. Her mother drifts between grief and hard bitter anger like a broken spar tossed by the sea, surfacing only moments here and there with the gentle affection that had once been so easy. Even Gamlen is little better, a quarter-century of old grievances rising like accursed darkspawn to poison the house around them.

The third night in a row Meeran's jobs send her home bloodied, she makes it two steps in the door before Gamlen's glare and Carver's sulk and her mother's grief flood over her like physical things, a cold tidewater swell dragging at her heart to pull her under.

"Enough," she snaps, sick past death of sorrow, and she grabs Carver by the arm. "Everyone, get up. Right now. We're going out."

It takes some convincing for her mother and a little more for Carver, obstinate only for the sake of it, but before long they are at a tiny scratched table in the Hanged Man, wedged between a group of card-playing sailors and a laughing pair of off-duty guards. She ignores her mother's wide eyes, ignores too Gamlen's suspicious stare, and when Norah makes her way to the table orders a bottle and a dozen shots of the strongest swill Corff has to offer.

"What—" starts her mother, but she cuts her off.

"We," she says, "are going to drink together as a family. Mother, Uncle, the bottle's for you. The shots—" she adds, cutting her eyes at Carver, "are so _we _can bond."

Carver snorts and rolls his eyes—but by the end of the night he is laughing, and Gamlen is grinning, and when Norah collects the empty glasses and calls her Hawke her mother smiles, and nods, and tucks her hand into her daughter's arm.

"Your father would be so proud," she whispers, and though it's not quite healing, not really, Hawke knows how it feels to have the knot in one's heart begin to loosen.

—

Three years gone and he's running, running, running—death at his heels and the whip behind it, and he cannot run far enough. A ship's belly bears him south until he's found in Llomerynn; he bribes another captain for passage to Ostwick, and though he spends the voyage crammed in the cargo hold with four barrels of pickled eels, his sword is sharp and his eyes are sharper and Ostwick finds him undiscovered by his hunters.

He travels west, because Kirkwall is large enough to lose himself and find information at the same time, and because he has heard the Circle there to be strong enough to keep the mages back. The city is divided into districts; he finds a disreputable inn in the poorer section that asks no questions and takes a small room, and for three days he watches the traders of the city ply their wares.

Eventually, he settles on a dwarf: on hard enough times not to wonder at the coin, friendly enough to be trusted with the task, simple enough not to think of spreading word of the elf approaching him with questionable work. He meets Anso at a tavern in Lowtown, wine at his elbow, ale for the dwarf, and pushes both the flagon and a small purse across the table.

He says, "Find me someone who will fight."

—

Two hours and one shade-filled mansion later, and she doesn't know whether she's made a friend or an enemy.

"I should have realized sooner what you really were," he snarls, and even though Carver, her wonderful idiot brother, finds a sudden protective streak, the elf's apology still sounds like it's been dragged out with thorns.

"Can't be helped," she tells him lightly, lifting one shoulder in a shrug. "But you wouldn't be the first to distrust me for it."

He frowns, staring at her, and for one wild moment she thinks of whiskey and a summer beneath a spreading oak.

All these years, and it seems she's never made it past eighteen.

—

He has been in the city too long. Too many people know his name, his face, where he sleeps; too many people call him friend and expect his blade in their defense.

Come to the Hanged Man, she says, for cards. Have a good time. Stay a while longer.

He doubts her, but somehow—he does.

—

She drops the bottle and two heavy tumblers on the table between them and he looks up, wary but not afraid.

"Fenris," Hawke says, and she smiles.

—

"Let's have a drink."


	7. Then There's Tongue (Hawke & Fenris)

**AN:** And now, a series of shortfics I did for the kiss meme on Tumblr.

* * *

w0rdinista asked: TWENTY TWO. F!HAWKE AND FENRIS. GO!

—

**Characters/Pairing:** F!Hawke/Fenris  
**Rating:** G  
**Word Count:** 700  
**Prompt:** 22. Then there's tongue—

—

The thing is—

The thing _is_, if Hawke is desperately, embarrassingly honest with herself, is that she is an idiot. She knows this. She's very well aware of this. And yet, half-drunk on Anderfels white wine and listening to Fenris read her the latest letter from Charade, she can't even pretend to listen to his words in the light of her abrupt obsession with Fenris's mouth. His lips keep doing the most—_interesting _things around his Rs, and the muscles of his neck and throat move so _nicely _around some of his vowels, and then he reads _I hope to see Gamlen with you soon _and the tip of his tongue flicks between his teeth just so on the _with_, and Hawke barely tamps down her sudden urge to remind herself of _exactly _how that tongue would feel flicking somewhere else.

"Mm," she says belatedly into an expectant pause, slumping a bit further into her armchair. "Wonderful. Go on."

Fenris lifts an eyebrow from where he sits on the sofa. "Are you listening?"

There's that _R _again, and those lips pursing around _you_, and a pleasant shudder ripples down Hawke's back as she lifts her wineglass to her mouth. "Avidly."

"What did I say?"

She is, now that she thinks of it, perhaps a little more than half-drunk. "'Are you listening?' Which I am. Like I said."

His lip curls. She loves that expression on him, loves it more when she's been the one to cause it; Fenris's mouth is one of his most expressive features, the twist of it or the thin-pressed lips or the slight, almost-gone curve of a smile conveying more to her than a hundred words could from someone else. And it's not just his voice, though she loves that, too, especially when it drops low and rumbling in her chest; rather it's the way he deliberates over every word, each syllable chosen thoughtfully and carefully over many others, as if now that he has won for himself the freedom to speak his mind he is determined not to cheapen it with thoughtless sounds.

Then Fenris says, "_Hawke._"

Her eyes fall shut as a hopeless, besotted laugh slips free (appropriate, says the Aveline in her head, considering she's doing a rather good impression of a sot at the moment), the tingling of her skin seeming to coalesce into something rather hotter at the pit of her stomach, coiling there in dark, heady promise. "I've been listening," she says, hearing the words trickle out of her like wine, like honesty, and then, with only the slightest struggle to extricate herself from the armchair, she manages something like a standing position and makes her almost-steady way across the room.

Fenris rescues the wineglass from her hand—empty, she realizes, and hopes that it's because she finished the glass rather than dribbled a trail of white wine across the carpet—and places it on the polished endtable with Charade's letter. Then he looks up at her where she stands above him, that rare, sweet, half-smirking curve to his mouth, and Hawke touches the corner of it with clumsy fingers before she pours herself into his lap. His hands come to her waist automatically, sliding around to the curve of her spine as she settles atop him, her knees on either side of his hips, her chest against his, her mouth brushing over his wonderful smiling mouth. "I've been listening," she repeats, not at all sorry for the wine she knows is on her breath, not at all hesitant as she cups that strong jaw in her hands, encouraging his lips to part just enough for her tongue to slip between them. "But," she adds eventually, nipping his full lower lip as she draws back just enough to speak, "I can't say I've heard a word."

Fenris laughs, low and rumbling, and she grins at the eager stroke of his hands down her back. "Then allow me to repeat myself," he murmurs, voice dropping delightfully on the last word, and proceeds to put his clever tongue to a much more satisfying use than her cousin's letters.


	8. Underwater Kiss (Hawke & Fenris)

Lilou88 asked: #20 for Fenris and Hawke. :D

—

**Characters/Pairing:** F!Hawke/Fenris  
**Rating:** G  
**Word Count:** 700  
**Prompt:** 20. Author's Choice; I picked #18 - underwater kiss!

—

Fenris doesn't remember learning to swim.

He supposes he must have, once, perhaps with his sister by his side in some warm Seheron river, the jungle-green leaves stretching broad and silent above their heads—but this is a fancy of his imagination, he knows, because those days to him are lost. Still, his muscles' memories remain if nothing else, and as he cuts through the cool lake water with long, powerful strokes, it is with the ease of much practice and many hours spent like this.

The water is calm and clear, dark with night sky and ringed with the shadows of trees, and as he draws near the place where Hawke treads water in the center of the little lake he slows to an easier stroke, feeling the water tug and pull against his bare feet with what little current Hawke has stirred. She grins, her pale shoulders just edging out of the water, and shoves her dripping hair away from her face.

"Glad you could join me," she tells him, her voice quiet in the hush of evening breezes and the distant call of crickets.

Fenris snorts. "You said the water was warm."

"I'm sure it's very nice during the day."

"Of course," Fenris says, perfectly aware of her duplicity, and when she moves to float on her back he drifts beside her in content silence. Her hair spreads out behind her, a black fan drawn over the lake's mirror of reflected, shimmering stars, and Fenris draws his fingers through the feathering ends until the heavens shiver with the motion.

Hawke laughs, softly, and turns her head to look at him. Her eyes are very bright. "You can't get views like this on the Wounded Coast."

"No," he agrees, watching the water lap at the bare skin of her shoulders.

After a long moment Hawke smiles, the moonlight catching only a moment on the glimpse of her teeth, and then with a quick exhaled breath she disappears beneath the surface of the lake. Fenris blinks, looking at the place where she vanished; then, as the ripples begin to settle and the stars smooth into mirrored glass, he smirks and lets out his breath, too.

The lake is dim beneath the surface, no star's light to show him Hawke here—but Fenris needs no such luxuries, and with a moment's thought his lyrium begins lighting, vein by vein, faint blue-white light resolving the gentle shadow before him into the softer features of Hawke's face. Her eyes are wide at first, caught in this unexpected trap; then she _smiles_, and draws nearer with a smooth motion, and lyrium light plays down the curve of her cheek, the rise of her breast, rippling with the motion of the water and the slow kicking of their feet.

He reaches for her, his palm alight. A silent laugh bursts free of her mouth in a cloud of a thousand tiny bubbles that flicker like white stars as they vanish upward; then her fingers are on his and between them, and her legs are tangling with his legs, and in the smooth cool glide of water her mouth glides across his own.

His eyes close despite themselves, and when she draws back it is harder than he expects to open them again. And yet somehow she is still there, caught in his arms and in the gentler grasp of the lake, and her eyes are bright with the light that flows from his skin to hers.

It's true that Fenris does not remember learning to swim. Still—still. Like this, with the stars somewhere above him in one smooth unbroken stretch across a still, silent lake, there are some things he knows he will never forget.


	9. Goofy Kiss (Hawke & Fenris)

Anonymous asked you: F!Hawke/Fenris - Goofy Kiss

—

**Characters/Pairing:** F!Hawke/Fenris  
**Rating:** G  
**Word Count:** 1200  
**Prompt:** #17 - goofy kiss

—

The Champion's out in her garden again. Jule can't help but notice, can't help but pause, either, jabbing her embroidery needle through a loose bit of fabric in order to pull the curtain a little further away from the window. She's not supposed to be watching the Champion—_certainly _not supposed to speak to her, according to her mother's frequent lectures on her general unsuitability for a young noblewoman's friendship—but the window of her little sitting room looks directly over the Champion's back garden, and despite the lectures she can't help but be fascinated by her rather unusually-titled neighbor.

"Jule," comes a voice at the door, and she drops the white-lace curtain hurriedly, plucking the needle from its home in the embroidered branches of an apple tree. Her mother takes a few steps into the room, dressed for company. "I'm going over to Charity's for lunch. Will you be all right here by yourself?"

"Of course," she says, as easily as she can. "Say hello to Elery for me."

A faint tinge of suspicion chases across her mother's face, but after a moment it gives way to a smile. "I will, dear," she tells her, and departs, and the moment she is gone Jule abandons her embroidery to the cushion beside her and looks back to the window.

The Champion is still there, kneeling on the ground beside the old stone bench half-hidden under a broad-spreading tree. It had shocked her, the first time she'd realized the woman elbow-deep in dirt was the noble Hawke everyone was so concerned with. At the time the garden had been terribly overgrown, years of neglect and misuse turning it into a massive green nest of weeds and poison ivy, the rather uncouth men who'd been in residence before her little concerned with maintenance—but then one day she'd looked down and there had been Hawke, not yet the Champion, in the most ridiculous broad-brimmed hat, a pile of weeds behind her measuring as large as the massive mabari dozing at her hip. Jule could hardly _help _watching, really, as week by week the weeds receded, and a little path emerged, and somewhere under the ivy-choked tree a picturesque stone bench had found its way to light again.

She is not in her hat today. A shame, really—she will not be out long, then—but as Hawke sits back on her heels and scrubs her forearm across her eyes the back door opens and a voice calls out from inside. Hawke answers something—Jule can't quite understand the words through the closed window, and she isn't daring enough to open it for the sake of true eavesdropping—but a moment later, the dark, tattooed elf strides out into the garden to meet her.

Jule sucks in a breath, her cheeks coloring despite the distance and her own relative privacy. This has been an entirely different thing, watching the elf's relationship to Hawke change and strain and resolve itself over the years. She's only gotten glimpses of it from her window, the tail ends of some fights and the beginnings of others and brief, painful moments of tears and the Lady Amell holding her daughter before she died; but in the last few months something has changed between them, something very deep and very strong, and in spite of her own misgivings it makes her—happy to see them together.

The elf stands over her, lean shadow thrown across her shoulders, and asks something Jule cannot hear. Hawke nods, smiling at him over her shoulder, and that seems to be enough; the elf—Fenris, she's almost certain he's called—moves to sit on the stone bench, crossing one leg lazily at the knee, pointing at some patch of weeds in the far corner with a murmured word. That startles a sharp retort out of the Champion, but it's followed by a quick, bright laugh, and even as Jule covers her mouth to stifle her own laughter the Champion reaches over and tickles the bottom of the elf's bare foot.

He jerks away, scowling, and both Hawke and Jule snicker; then the Champion pushes to her feet and stands before the elf on the bench, her hair sticking to her cheeks, his green eyes narrowed in suspicion that is clear enough even from Jule's lofty perch. Hawke says something, bending low, and the elf answers her in kind—and then, grinning, Hawke takes his face in both dirt-stained hands, smearing earth across his cheeks and down his jaw. The elf sputters, batting at her hands, brushing at his own face ineffectually—Jule laughs again despite herself, because as terrifying as he looks when he is angry she knows he can be surprisingly fastidious about his own appearance—but before he can rid himself of either the dirt or Hawke's groping fingers the Champion pulls his mouth up to meet hers.

Jule gasps, colors, and turns away. The apple tree with its silver-needle decoration looks back at her cheerfully, entirely complacent in the afternoon sunlight; when she musters the courage to look down again, Fenris has risen from the bench, Hawke's arms twined around his shoulders, his own hands knotted between the blades of her shoulders. They are still kissing, his complaints about the dirt apparently forgotten, and continue to do so for some time—certainly longer than Jule has ever seen people kiss, _certainly _longer than her mother would deem as anything even approaching appropriate. Still, when at last they pull apart, there is a contentment in the lines of his shoulders and the ease of his limbs that she has never seen in him before, and Jule can't help the foolish smile that spreads across her face at the sight of it. They've been unhappy together so _long_, and it's—rather nice to see something else, even if she knows she shouldn't be watching in the first place.

The Champion reaches up, then, to brush a bit of the dirt from his cheek. She murmurs something and the elf laughs, catching her still-soiled wrists in his hands, and as they make their way together into the privacy of the Champion's home Jule allows the curtain to drop across the window again. Her embroidery still sits placidly beside her, a perfectly respectable diversion for a perfectly respectable young woman with perfectly respectable friends. It's not that she dislikes it, not really—even her mother could not have forced her to embroidery had she hated the idea—but…

But she has never smeared dirt over a lover's cheeks, and she has never been kissed like _that_.

Tomorrow, she decides, she will invite the Champion to tea. Her mother will be scandalized and her father will purse his lips and lift his eyebrows, and yet, she doesn't care. The Champion brought a bench and a path and a garden and a _home_ out of a weed-choked mess; all Jule has is an apple tree made of green thread and a silver needle, but that's more than nothing and she's eager to learn what nineteen years of respectability haven't taught her. Hawke knows; she's watched her learn it. She hopes she's smart enough to learn it, too.

Smiling, Jule plucks the apple tree from the window seat. It's just a bit of colorful thread woven through white fabric but—she's chosen her pattern to follow, here, and she thinks, somehow, it's a start.


	10. Hot, Steamy Kiss (Hawke & Fenris)

apocalisse asked you: Since you asked… 1, F!Hawke and Fenris :) - Hot, Steamy Kiss

—

**Characters/Pairing:** F!Hawke/Fenris  
**Rating:** T  
**Word Count:** 1200  
**Prompt:** #1 - hot, steamy kiss  
**Notes: **I took this completely literally and I don't even feel sorry about it; also, written under the influence of powerful painkillers, so…take it for what it is.

—

Sometimes, very rarely, when the stars are aligned just so and the wind comes north-easterly with the tiniest hint of the sea and the Maker himself drops the bare edge of a smile in her direction, Hawke catches Fenris humming in the bath.

Today, as it turns out, is one of those exceedingly rare days, because as Hawke slips into her bedroom with a glass of water in one hand and an apple between her teeth, a faint snatch of…_something _floats through the barely-ajar door on the other side of the room. The crisp scent of her soap hangs in the air around her, and the room is heavy with heat and the dampness of open water; she places the apple and her glass on the desk as quietly as she can, delighted beyond reason, and creeps to the doorway of her bathing room on her toes.

And of course, there is Fenris in her enormous copper-and-wood tub, looking for all the world like some decadent nobleman sprawled amid his luxuries. His head leans heavily against the curved rim of the tub, his eyes closed, his face pointed to the ceiling; Hawke follows the bared lines of lyrium ribbing down his throat and chest to where they disappear beneath the steaming water, vaguely embarrassed that her breath goes so shallow at the sight of them but not embarrassed enough to turn away. One long, muscled leg stretches out before him, his bare, callused foot dangling over the tub's lip; his other leg is bent at the knee, more lyrium curving stark and white across his dark skin where it rises from the bathwater in a delicious contrast that makes her mouth go dry.

Even as she watches he hums again, slipping one hand behind his head, the lyrium over his throat just barely rippling with the sound. Water drips from his elbow, slides in rivulets down the muscles of his arm and across his chest, and it's only a few measures of a song she doesn't know but his voice is _good_ and strong and he looks utterly content amid the steam curling around his shoulders—

And the most attractive man she's ever met is lying naked in her bathtub, and Hawke will be damned before she lets an opportunity like this go to waste.

(Isabela, she thinks dazedly, will _die _when she tells her this.)

"Knock knock," she singsongs, rapping her knuckles against the open door. "All decent in here?"

"No," Fenris says without bothering to open his eyes, but she can see a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. The room is much muggier than she'd expected, she realizes, practically a sauna between the heat and the steam and the closed windows, and in only a few moments her clothes have begun to stick to her skin.

Somehow, she doesn't care in the slightest. "My favorite way to find you," Hawke tells him, seating herself carefully on the edge of the tub. He looks at her, then, eyelids lifting just enough for slivers of green to fix to her face, and Hawke brushes a bit of damp white hair from his forehead. "I don't see how you can breathe in this. It's like a mabari's sitting on my chest, the air's so thick."

"I would have it hotter," he admits, glancing at the clear summer skies out the high window. "But this does well enough."

Hawke quirks an eyebrow and dips one hand into the water by his hip. "Say when," she says, grinning, and when he makes no objection she reaches for fire, threading heat down her arm and wrist and palm until a fresh plume of steam billows out from the water. It takes only a few seconds—though even that is long enough to nearly scald her fingers—and then Fenris lets out a long, satisfied sigh and sinks further into the water.

"Better?" she asks, shaking out her hand ruefully.

"Better," he says, and this time when he looks at her the heat from the bath has slid into his eyes, the green made darker with open suggestion. "Thank you, Hawke."

"Just don't come running to me when your flesh starts falling off your bones. That water's almost boiling."

"Heated baths were a rare privilege in Minrathous. I enjoy the…"

"Freedom?" she suggests, propping one hand on the bathtub's rim as she leans nearer.

"Indulgence," he says instead, and lifts one hand from the water to wrap it around her wrist. His hand is _hot_, his pulse thumping hard and quick in his fingertips, and the lyrium striped across his palm tingles and pricks as the bathwater runs in warm trails across the back of her hand.

Hawke grins, shaking her head, at once amused and exasperated at the sudden racing of her heart. "If that's an invitation, I have to decline. At least for a few minutes, anyway; I've no intention of reddening up like a lobster for the sake of a quick cuddle."

Fenris laughs, the bathwater rippling with the motion, steam puffing away from his mouth in a little cloud of disturbed air. His head falls back against the bathtub's curved lip again, eyes half-closed and hooded as he watches her, and then his thumb strokes very gently and very deliberately up the inside of her wrist, and Hawke wonders if he can feel the skipping beats of her heart. "Not only that," he murmurs, that same terrible promising smile sliding across his face again.

The most attractive man she's ever met— "Damn you," Hawke says roughly, and throws her other arm to the copper edge of the tub across him in a clumsy brace as she leans down and kisses him. Fenris lifts himself to meet her, water sloshing away from his ribs as he rises, as his mouth comes hot and wet and eager against hers; one dripping hand curls around the back of her neck, steaming water trickling down her spine, into her shirt already stuck to her back with sweat and humidity. He strokes the side of her neck once, twice, and she shudders at the gentleness of it; he laughs into her mouth and she tastes his own sweat, and the tang of lyrium, and a deeper _something _made of smoke and leather that she has always loved, cannot help but love now.

Eventually, though, he pulls away, or she does—somehow they find themselves apart, anyway, and Hawke blows out a breathless chuckle between her teeth. "You are _ridiculous_," she tells him, because he _is_, this perfectly ridiculous elf soaking lazily in her bathtub in water a thousand degrees hotter than it should be, his cheeks flushed with heat and more than that, eyes smug and satisfied and dark with desire as he watches her fruitless attempts to smooth her curling hair away from her face, to pull her hopelessly damp shirt away from her chest.

"No more so than you," Fenris points out, eyebrow lifting, and raises both hands from the water to cross them behind his head. He closes his eyes. Hums a half-measure of something low and gentle.

Hawke looks at him a long moment, quietly.

Then she says, "Oh, _screw_ it," and a moment later her shirt sails off into the white-curling steam that surrounds them.

She does scald a little, just at first, but it is worth it.


	11. Forceful Kiss (Hawke & Fenris)

Anonymous asked you: 19, f!Hawke/Fenris – forceful kiss

—

**Characters/Pairing:** F!Hawke/Fenris  
**Rating:** M  
**Word Count:** 1500  
**Prompt:** #19 - forceful kiss  
**Notes: **Smut. Also, loosely inspired by real events in game. I hate to admit it, but not all of Eppie's bad decisions are her own fault.

—

It takes all of ten seconds after the high dragon falls for Fenris's hand to close around Hawke's arm. Her head whips around at the touch and he sees challenge in her eyes, and anger too—_good, _he thinks, furious, and does not bother to loosen his grip.

"What," he snarls, "was _that_?"

She lifts her chin without looking away, blood still seeping from the open wound across the bridge of her nose. "Isabela," she calls, her voice even, "will you and Merrill give us a minute?"

"You can't possibly be serious. There is a _high_ _dragon's_ cache somewhere around here and if you think I'm just going to let it _languish_—"

"It'll still be there in fifteen minutes," Hawke says—snaps, really—and after a moment of surprised silence, Isabela lets out a low _ooh _of understanding. Merrill looks between them, confusion and worry evident in her face, but Fenris jerks his head impatiently and Isabela slings her arm around Merrill's slim shoulders, leading her back up the path and out of sight.

Hawke still has not dropped her gaze. If anything she looks angrier than before, and when Fenris steps closer she jerks her arm out of his hand. "Explain yourself, Hawke," he says again, low and growling beneath the thin shreds of what control remains to him.

"There's nothing to explain," she says, anger rippling down her words. "You saw exactly what happened."

"I saw you throw yourself beneath the feet of a high dragon. I saw you ignore every thought of your own safety and the safety of those you fight with—"

"That's what I was trying to _protect! _You saw Merrill go down—that dragon came down right on top of her and she wasn't moving—"

Fenris's lip curls, his hands fisting. "And so, like a _fool_, you rush beneath its feet yourself."

She sucks in a harsh breath between her teeth, outrage stifling her voice. "You—how dare you. Someone had to go after her and you sure as the _Void _weren't going to do it—and _aside_ from the fact that we needed her help to fight, Fenris, I do happen to actually care about what happens to Merrill!"

"Fine words," he snaps, stung, "but sentiment is poor armor against a dragon's talons." He can still see it in his mind's eye, playing over and over in a terrible loop; one powerful bunching of the dragon's muscled haunch and Hawke had been _gone_, flying backwards into the sheer cliff face, her head slamming into an outcropped boulder with a sickening _crack_. She'd fallen face-first to the sand, utterly still, and for one clear silent moment he'd known—he'd _known—_

But a minute later she'd stumbled to her feet, one hand alight with healing magic pressed to her own head, and the cold knot of terror behind his heart had begun to blaze with fury.

"Considering it was your _sentiment _for Merrill motivating me in the first place," Hawke grits out, each word clipped short, "I frankly think that's a pretty shit argument."

Fenris's lips twist, wordless in anger, and in four quick steps he has Hawke pinned against the hillock rising from the center of the clearing. Already, the sun has begun to set; the rise of earth casts them both in shadow, dimming the flash of steel on steel as Hawke wraps her gauntleted hands around his wrists. And yet—

And yet, the burning of her eyes into his has not lessened in the least.

He relishes that. Relishes too the defiant lift of her chin, the tendons pulling tight in her throat as he leans closer, crowding her, knowing he is crowding her. "You should have waited. You _know _this."

"A minute or two—"

"—would have made no difference. _None. _The blood—Merrill was _down_. That would not have changed. A delay of even a few seconds would have permitted us to draw the beast away, and then you would have been free to heal her with no danger. Instead—" she starts to speak, eyes blazing, but Fenris overrides her without mercy, "instead you rushed in without thought and endangered yourself, and it was good fortune _alone _that did not leave the two of us fighting a high dragon with no mage and _no healer_!"

"Why, _Fenris_," she says, mocking, edged, "if I didn't know better, I'd say you sounded _concerned._"

He bares his teeth—but there is something else beneath her scorn, something open and hot with challenge. He searches her face, his grip tightening on her shoulders—and the instant he sees the tight smirk at the corner of her mouth he _knows_, and even before she starts to yank him closer he is already crashing his mouth over hers.

It has been a long time since they've fought like this, longer still since he has felt so frantic for her touch—but his heart races in his chest, a wild thundering gallop still caught in the ice-bright terror of watching her crumple to the ground. Hawke knows it, he realizes distantly as her steel-tipped fingers scrape across his neck, knows his anger owes as much to fear as fury, and though it grates to find himself so transparent before her he is gratified to feel her own heart beating just as high and hard in her throat as his, her quick gasps into his mouth just as needy, her own hands just as eager to grasp and hold and _take _as his own.

Hawke opens her mouth under him. He drives his tongue between her teeth, drives his thigh between her legs; she bites his lip and tightens her hand in his hair until it hurts, a glinting pain that sets him snarling. She barks a short, sharp laugh that cuts off into a gasp as he presses harder against her; then her hands are scrabbling between them and her belt is falling loose and his is too, and somehow between them both laces come undone and smalls are shoved aside and her ankles lock together at the small of his back as he pins her with his whole weight against the face of the hill behind her.

"You can be such a bastard," Hawke gasps, her teeth closing around the tip of his ear. "I _hate _how you treat Merrill sometimes."

"And you," Fenris says into her neck just as tightly, each bite he leaves there dragging a hiss from Hawke, "are frequently careless to the point of stupidity."

"This coming from the most stubborn man in the Free Marches—"

"Justifiably so, when it comes to your inattention—"

"Don't you _dare _talk to me about justifiability right now!"

"As you wish," he snaps, and she yanks his mouth back over her own.

They neither of them last long, not like this, not with anger still between them, not with the knowledge that Isabela and Merrill will be back too soon. Instead it is short and rough and quick, all fingernails and sharp-tipped steel, all teeth and hot gasps and kisses too hard for the word, and when Hawke throws her head against his throat and hisses out a long string of curses he is not far behind her, his grip tensing on her thighs until he knows she must bruise.

It is only after, when her breathing begins to slow, when his own heart thumps into a rhythm less desperate, that Fenris feels his anger begin to give way at last.

He pulls free, slowly, lets her down as they both wince; without speaking they find their laces and belts and shove hair from faces and straighten themselves to decency again. Fenris knows it is likely a lost cause, at least with Isabela—even from here he can see the marks on Hawke's throat, can feel the ridged scratches on his own leathers where her gauntlets had scraped down his chest—but as he glances to Hawke and finds her watching him already he can do little but sigh.

He says, awkward and stilting, "I will…with—Merrill. I will try."

The corner of Hawke's mouth quirks up. Not quite a smile, but—close enough. "I'll work on the idiotic rushing into battle, then."

"An even trade."

"In the loosest sense of the word, I suppose."

He watches her a moment more, still caught in uncertainty—but as Isabela and Merrill draw into sight on the path curving down above them, Hawke's hand slips carefully into his, her gaze level and clear.

She squeezes his fingers gently, without anger. There is still steel between them, still too many sharp points and edges to catch them both, but here, for now—he needs nothing else.


	12. Eyelid Kiss & Kiss Along the Hips (H&F)

**AN: **Doubling up, here, since both of these are pretty short.

* * *

keptonice asked you: 8: Eyelid Kiss, for Fenris and fem-mage hawke

—

**Characters/Pairing:** F!Hawke/Fenris  
**Rating:** K  
**Word Count:** 500  
**Prompt:** #8 - eyelid kiss

—

"Leave it, Hawke."

"I will not. Even from here I can see that's swelling, so stop struggling and just let me—oh, _Fenris_. Ouch."

He glares up at her with one green eye, the other swelled shut beneath a massive purpling bruise. Hawke bends over him where he sits, holding his chin carefully between two fingers, turning his face from side to side in the cool dust-choked light of his mansion's great hall. The swelling is fresh—she guesses no more than a day old—and tender, too, if his hissing breath as she touches the swollen eyelid is any indication. "Flames, Fenris. How in the world did this happen?"

"An unfortunate accident."

"With someone's fist?" she retorts, though she is careful to keep her grip gentle as she brushes her thumb across the rise of his cheek, his black eyebrow, the faint glow of healing magic trailing after it like water. She does not rush—any magic involving eyes is tricky, and she has little desire to risk ones so dear to her—but after a few moments the tight, hot skin begins to lose something of its angry appearance. "What a _shiner_. You could win awards for this."

Fenris's mouth twists. "I," he begins, then falls silent, then tries again with a mutter, "Aveline is easily startled when she is inebriated."

She does not laugh. She doesn't. She _does _pause her healing to stare very intently through his open ceiling at the bright blue square of sky beyond it, swallowing hard twice, three times. Even so, her voice is strangled. "So that's why she—told me to stop by today."

"Perhaps," Fenris says sourly, and Hawke closes her eyes.

"_Well_," she says at last, as businesslike as she can be with the memory of Aveline's vaguely embarrassed note dancing behind her eyes. "At least you can rest assured knowing she can defend herself."

"I don't recall that the issue was in _question_."

"You did say she was drunk."

He snorts, but there is little bite to it. The swelling has almost entirely receded under her hand; a breath more of magic and even the discolored bruise is nearly gone, blood seeping back where it belongs, leaving this eye as whole and healthy as the other. Hawke lets out a breath, dropping her hand to cup his cheek; then, with a grin, she bends and presses her lips gently to his eyelid. "There," she tells him. "All better."

Fenris blinks up at her as he straightens, hand coming up to touch his now-healed skin. "That was—quicker than I expected."

She taps her own eye. "I had a lot of practice growing up. Carver was never one to pull his punches."

"Ah. I am…unsurprised."

"And healed," she adds, "which is more to the point."

And if she gets a bit lost in green as he stands, smiling, to kiss her, it's only a healer's duty, after all.

* * *

emmahasaface asked you: F!Hawks and Fenris #14 : ) - kiss along the hips

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**Characters/Pairing:** F!Hawke/Fenris  
**Rating:** K  
**Word Count:** 550  
**Prompt:** #14 - kiss along the hips

—

The first time Hawke sees for herself the full extent of Fenris's markings, she barely notices them. They are both desperate and hurried and entirely focused on other things, and by the time she manages both the concentration and slowing heart for something more thorough, he is up and dressed and going, going, half-gone already.

Then somehow a year is gone with him, and two, and three, and lines she'd barely mapped to begin with vanish from her mind with them. Oh, there are some she remembers—the curves on his upper arms and the bars striping down his throat she thinks she will know until she dies—but the rest…the rest blurs, and fades, dimming vein by vein until she thinks it might have been a dream after all.

But abruptly—three years _ends, _and exile ends with it, and though the first hours of their reunion are nearly as frantic as the ones that sent them spinning apart in the first place, afterwards, _after—_

After, Hawke stretches out beside him on his bed, studying without the slightest compunction the sated, sweating elf sprawled on his back beside her. A bit of white hair has stuck to his brow above his closed eyes; Hawke brushes it free, gratified when he neither flinches nor pulls away, laying bare the three dots of lyrium marking the center of his forehead.

She pauses without meaning to, stroking her thumb across the markings there in as open an affection as she dares. When Fenris does not object she grows bolder, tracing down the lines of his straight nose, his full mouth, winding down the lyrium that trails over his chin, his throat, the long curling bars across his chest.

"You are staring," he murmurs without moving.

"With good reason."

One green eye cracks at that, the faintest mark of confusion furrowing between his brows. "You have seen this before."

"Not," Hawke says, splaying her hand across the flat muscles of his stomach, across the lyrium stretching there, "_nearly_ enough."

He lifts an eyebrow—but cedes her the exploration, leaning back against his pillow, eyes half-lidded as he watches her slide her fingers over his ribs. His stomach jumps and twitches under her fingertips, making her laugh, but her amusement dims as she follows the lyrium down past his navel to the sharper curling fishhook just inside the bone of his hip. She does not say _this must have hurt so badly_, and he does not tell her _it did_.

Still, she cannot keep the gentleness from the motion as she bends to brush her mouth along the skin there, tasting sweat, feeling the whisper of fine, soft hair against her lips. Fenris draws in a silent breath that lifts against her mouth; when he breathes her name in a husky murmur she only grins, bringing her fingers up to join her lips, feathering her way down the lines and dots and whorls of lyrium that lead her somewhere rather more interesting.

"Unless you'd rather I not," she offers, startled at her own boldness, but the quick tangling of his fingers in her hair tell her otherwise, and without another moment of hesitation between them, Hawke sets about the pleasurable business of turning the lyrium's old memories into something better for them both.


	13. Neck Kiss (Isabela & Fenris)

rubyvroom asked you: Fenris/Isabela, 20, if you don't mind?

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**Characters/Pairing:** Isabela/Fenris  
**Rating:** T  
**Word Count:** 1600  
**Prompt:** #20 - author's choice  
**Notes: **Oh man, I enjoyed this so much. I picked "neck kiss" ostensibly, though it kind of grew a little larger than I expected. Anyway, I _really_ hope you like this; I had a ton of fun writing it, and I'm so glad you gave me the opportunity to write a different ship.

—

Isabela wears her jewelry like armor, gold and bronze and brass at her throat, in her mouth, where she is soft.

Fenris does not know this, not at first, not the first time. The first time he is half-drunk on death and she is freedom incarnate, and despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that he considers her a _friend _he finds himself at her door, at midnight, at something of a loss with this freedom he has won. And yet—and yet, he is certain she knows where he should start.

If she is surprised to see him, she doesn't show it. Fenris doesn't know if it's because he's that predictable or if she simply knows him that well; regardless, Isabela fists a hand in his collar and lets loose a smooth hot promise of a laugh that makes his mouth go dry and his feet nearly stumble as he follows her into the dark. Her boots stay on, that night, along with her bandanna and her necklace and the brassy discs at her ears. Next time—

There will be a next time. That is the start.

—

The next time is not long after that, and the time after that even sooner. Isabela cares nothing for his inexperience, as he'd both feared and hoped; rather, she laughs and slides her dark, sea-weathered hand across his stomach, and whispers _all the better to keep you from bad habits. _Still, Fenris finds himself an eager pupil and Isabela a very willing teacher, and between the two of them he learns how to make her gasp, and laugh, and clutch at his shoulders; she teaches him a better way to use his tongue than shouting, and another purpose for lyrium Danarius certainly did not intend, and that pain has no place in a bed unless both parties wish it. They are only little things to learn, he thinks, only small truths he should have known before—but Isabela drops them into his hands one by one, carelessly, endlessly, baubles of gold and silver from the vast rich stores of a pirate queen given freely and without price.

Sometimes he stays; sometimes he does not. Isabela keeps other lovers occasionally—Fenris does not begrudge her that, because he knows as well as she does the sea loves many—but he cannot deny that on the quiet nights, when it is only her body and his and no sound between them save the glide of skin on skin and soft breaths like the murmur of waves, there is something in his heart that stops its wounded beat, nears somehow closer to—peace.

He watches her eyes, those nights, turned to him like brass burning in the dark, and wishes he could read their heat.

—

One morning, when the sun is bright and hot and Isabela's little room is overwarm with Kirkwall's summer, Fenris lies on her bed and watches her dress. It is not until she tugs up her boots that he realizes how much he cherishes the long bare muscles of her legs, not until she brushes her hair in the mirror that he realizes how infrequently he has seen her without gold at her throat, at her ears, at her lip.

Isabela is not a woman willing to be cherished—he knows _that, _if nothing else—but he asks her about the jewelry nonetheless, his voice still low and rumbling with sleep, curiosity victor over comfortable silence.

Isabela looks at him in the mirror, her black, perfect eyebrow lifting, her kiss-reddened lips curving into a smile as beautiful and devastating as a storm. "Ask me again sometime," she purrs, rising from the vanity, sashaying out of the room into the brighter daylight of the Hanged Man proper.

Fenris rolls to his back, throws his arm across his eyes. Lyrium tugs at his skin, faintly, a suggestion and a reminder; a small smile slips across his own mouth, and he says to the empty room, "I will."

—

He does, some weeks later, when they are at last through with the Coast and he can barely breathe through the heavy weight of salt air sitting thick in his chest. Not with words, not exactly—rather, he reaches up and touches her face as she bends over him, a touch of neither lust nor simple friendship, and as she stills to something guarded and impenetrable he lets his fingers slide to one ear. Her hair is dark and heavy against his skin, still smelling of sea salt—but she does not move away as he brushes it to the side, does not flinch as he finds the little hook that holds her earring in place.

He pulls it free. She lets him.

The other comes after, two bright etched-brass coins almost as bright as her eyes in the dark. He puts them to the side, not forgotten but not—needed, not now, and when Isabela bends closer to kiss him there is something new in this touch that she has not yet taught him.

He learns, though. He does not forget.

—

Fenris keeps this lesson over the next days, and weeks, and months. The earrings come off nearly every time, whether it is by her hand or his; he knows human ears have little of an elf's sensitivity in them, but he enjoys the flesh of her earlobe between his teeth, the heady noises she makes as he puts his mouth to skin beneath them and sucks there. She pays back the favor as often as not—though he suspects, sometimes, she enjoys too much the sight of him shuddering beneath her mouth—and when one day he catches her tongue working at her own lower lip, he is not entirely surprised to see the small gold stud slide free, into his waiting palm.

It is only a little thing, only a little ball of metal and gilt and a long straight post to fix it. Isabela glances at it against his callused skin, against the lyrium striping across his palm beneath it, then looks at him with brows raised as if to say: _so what now?_

He smiles, and puts it with the earrings, and they both pretend they cannot feel his heart thudding fast and hard in his throat.

—

The necklace, then, is the last to go, the final piece of armor shed like so many errant leaves in autumn. Fenris unclasps it himself, one evening, when the moon is full and clear and more than enough to light Isabela's little room, when she comes to him without a word, naked save this last bit of gold, and turns, and sighs, and pulls her hair from the nape of her neck. It spills over her hands like water, tangling around her fingers; he wishes he had that excuse for the sudden clumsiness of his hands as he reaches up for the tiny clasps holding the pieces together. The first one is harder than he expects for something so small and delicate—Isabela snorts a quip about men and women's smallclothes and he cannot help but laugh—but it comes free eventually, as they all do, as surely as the chains she'd taught him to snap inside his heart, and the gold and brass and bronze clink softly against themselves as he drops the necklace to the bed.

He stands there for a long moment, his fingers tracing over the bumps of her spine, the smooth dark curving skin so much softer than his own; then, when he feels her shoulders lift with a slow breath, he bends his head and presses his mouth to her neck.

It is not the most heated kiss he has ever given her; neither is it the most passionate.

It _is _the most intimate. And as her hand comes up slow and sure to slip into his hair, to hold him where he stands against her, his arms slide around her shoulders in nothing less than an embrace. And it _is _an embrace, because he wishes to embrace her, because Isabela has taught him that not all cages are prisons and not all yield means restraint.

His mouth moves, from her neck to her ear to her throat. She lets him, her head tipping back to bare herself to him; then she turns and puts one hand on his chest with her eyes like burnished brass and in one deft motion pins him to the bed beneath her.

She does not release him until dawn. Even then, he does not go.

—

Isabela wears jewelry like armor. Each piece is a shield, a guard, a bright distraction from the tender parts of her they hide—but Fenris knows what lies beneath them, now, knows too that armor has its place in battle and in their bed and even between them, occasionally, when teeth and tongue wound more than heal. There's death between them, too, and behind them, quiet fights and bruised places marked by more than accident; and yet they're caught in freedom all the same, because no bars can hold a ghost and no lock can stop a thief, and if somehow they've tangled themselves into each other it's only two halves of the same coin coming home again.

"What do you think?" Isabela asks him one evening, bare feet on the table, half-empty bottle of rum dangling from one hand. "A ship, white sails, and the sea?"

"Only with the right captain," Fenris says, and she laughs as she looks to him, her eyes shining like gold.


End file.
